I was a research associate at KMi starting from 2003. My research was a key contribution towards an on-going effort in the lab to build a new generation of applications and tools that exploit the large scale and distributed semantic information available online. In particular, my research line was related to explore, develop and evaluate novel forms of Natural Language questions answering, able to take advantage and cope both with the huge number of structured data available on the Semantic Web and also with their extreme heterogeneity. As well as, to devise novel forms to exploit the combination of information spaces provided by the Semantic Web and by the (non-semantic) WWW and enhance traditional keyword-search technologies.
During my stay at KMi, I participated in several European projects (Dot.Kom, AKT, OpenKnowledge, Xmedia, SmartProducts) and I was the project champion and main developer of AquaLog and PowerAqua, a pioneer systems in Natural Language interfaces for the Semantic Web. PowerAqua is the first implemented question answering system that combines and aggregates semantic information, publicly available on the Web, to interpret and answer user queries pose in Natural language on the fly.
